From the Bottle Collection: Jack Daniels Amber Lager

Without intent, I have collected well over 1,000 beer bottles since the early 70s. When something finally had to be done about the cheap paneling in this old modular, I had a choice. Tear down the walls while, oh, so carefully, replacing the often rotted 1X3s. Or: cover them with… The Bottle Collection.

Written by Ken Carman

This is one of those beers created by a company that really wasn’t a brewery, most likely because they knew micro-brewing was “the in thing” at the moment. Kind of embarrassing most of the time, but at least Jack is a distillery. Not all that notable, taste-wise, from what I remember. Daniels is noted for distilling, in this case brewing, in a dry county. They can’t sell locally. There’s a lot of that in the South.

It wasn’t horrid, and it certainly wasn’t like some of those labels we will feature later that the brewer simply slapped a label on so some bar or other business could claim to be selling their own beer. But you would think a company that already works in the alcohol producing business would go out of their way to make their product unique other than labelling. Exactly how it was “1888” in any sense I was never quite sure. My guess is, from what I remember, it was more like the early amber lagers produced in the early 80s/late 70s before micro really took off. Essentially the industry had already moved beyond JD before they ever even got into this in 1994. Apparently they took this endeavor so seriously that, as a producer of alcohol, they didn’t even bother to brew most of it themselves, but at Cinci’s Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Company, now Christian Moerlein Brewing Company.